Year In Numbers: 2013

We have changed up the format of Month In Numbers slightly this month in order accommodate for a Year In Numbers post looking back at some of the big online stats and facts in for the whole of 2013.

1

Though he lost his ‘most followed’ crown on Twitter this year Justin Bieber was the most searched person online in 2013 in the UK according to Bing. The only male star to make the list he beat both Beyonce and Kate Middleton who made 2nd and 3rd in the list. The birth of Prince George was the most searched news story and the XBox the most most looked up electronic device. YouTube did not make the top 10 of the most searched for social networks while Twitter topped this list.

33.5%

This year ‘Mega Monday’ saw a 33.5% increase in UK online sales compared to the same day last year making it the biggest online shopping day in history. Amazon’s sales on black Friday were up by 63% and eBay’s 84%, however research showed that only around 1% of purchases and traffic on ecom sites on Black Friday were generated by social media sites.

1,730,000,000

In the last 5 years social media has exploded in size. There is now 1,730,000,000 active social media users world wide equating for a 1/4 of the population using it, 1.2 billion of these are on Facebook.

20 million

YouTube has revealed that the Evian ‘baby & me’ advert (below) was the UK’s favourite ad of 2013. The ad generated 20 million views in 2 days and 100 million after 10 weeks globally as well as being shared more than 6.9 million times. Despite only being released last month in second place was the John Lewis ‘The Bare & The Hare’, which has been double the number of views than their snowman advert this time last year.

Not so much a month in number stat but fancy travelling back in time? The Space Jam website has not changed since 1996!

30m

3 years ago Wikipedia had 14 million articles and 85,000 contributors NOW they have more than 30 million articles in 287 languages and 125,900 active registered users!

£8.5 billion

It has been predicted that slow websites will cost UK online retailers £8.5 billion in 2013 due to loss of conversions. Summit tested 230 leading online retailers and discovered that over 92% of these are failing the meet the industry standard of a 3 second page load benchmark with some of them even taking 8 seconds or more.

1,728

Online fashion retailer ASOS has beaten off the likes of John Lewis and Amazon to come off top in the the highest amount of web content shared on Pinterest. ASOS shared in the four weeks to 22nd November an average of 1728 pins per week. In the two years that Searchmetrics have been collecting the data ASOS has received a massive total of 160,958 pins on the social networking site.

84%

This percentage of the top 100 websites in the world now rely on advertising to generate revenue, as in ‘use our site for free but you may need to look at a few ads at the same time’. The extensive use of adblocker tools suggests that we are less forgiving of adverts online than on TV and radio. Adblock Plus, the most popular adblocker, has been downloaded 250 million times and has around 60 million active users.

19.5 million

This is the number of customers that Amazon serve DAILY! This video shows a whole pile of interesting Amazon facts.

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The most talked about topics on Facebook in 2013 have been revealed, topping the charts in the UK was Andy Murray’s Wimbledon victory with the death of Margaret Thatcher second. Worldwide the most talked about topic in 2013 was the election of Pop Francis in May. The birth of the Royal Baby featured on both the UK and global most talked about list. However with the passing of Nelson Mandela these results could change as by the end of the day after his death there had already been 55 million people interacting with Facebook regarding it. Facebook also released this video of their Year in Review.

828,773

This is the number of copies Beyonce’s album BEYONCE sold in just 3 days after its unexpected release making it the fastest selling release in the history of the music store a pretty big feat for an album with no run-up marketing campaign.

1,498,631

This is the number of ‘likes’ that the most popular photo on Instagram got this year. Justin Bieber’s picture of him and Will Smith posing posted at the end of August was titled ‘Me and Uncle Will’.

And so we wave goodbye to 2013 – so looking forward to seeing what numbers 2014 brings!